March 9, 2007 10:47 pm

Kanban system of project management

David Anderson shares about using Kanban system at Corbis for their project management. First, I had never heard about kanban system. Reading the description on David’s blog, it may although look like agile system, he clarifies that providing key differences between kanban system and the agile management.

I have been part of sustaining projects for couple of years now, a drawback I had noticed was each set of change requests were treated as projects by themselves. Change requests were of course prioritized as what was absolute requirement for each such quarterly release. However, I did find the pros in that as the budgeting and the controlling projects were streamlined although we had 3 or 4 parallel efforts going on at any point of time on isolated pieces and at times on the same codeline that would have to be merged at some point. On the same line, I am wondering how the project management with respect to budgeting and being in control works with kanban system as described by David. Agreed, I am yet to learn more about kanban system before I make any such comments, but this was my initial thought reading the post.

The other concern I have per the blog post is with respect to biweekly release. I am hoping TFS is helping in better source code management; and at the same time keep the teams focused and not randomized on different change request requirements. One of the challenges we had faced was randomization of team members while mixing up change requests and improper prioritizing at times. Well, I need to read further to understand kanban system further.